This blog reports on the activities of a group of Hiroshima-based foreigners & their Japanese friends who play 3-player mahjong.
3-player mahjong is a variation of the standard Japanese 4-player mahjong (some games of which are also reported here).
Some of us also play Go, some play football, so those activities are also reported on and no opportunity is missed to digress onto other topics that have nothing to do with anything related to Mahjong, Igo, Football or Hiroshima...

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Mahjong Question: Ron or Chombo?

Hey David,

So last night I was playing and this situation came up:

Player 1 (Oya) has declared Riichi. Play goes twice around, then Player 2 declares Riichi. I'm Player 3 and I don't go Riichi but wait (if a 9-Circles comes I can go Ron with Itsuukan, but otherwise am just going to play it safe and look for Tsumo or safe discards). Goes around again and Player 2 discards a 9-Circles and I call "Ron". In frustration, Player 2 flips his hand over explaining how close he was, yet upon looking we both realize that he in fact committed a Chombo - He declared Riichi but was unable to finish. This was after I had claimed Ron off his discard.

Therefore, does the Ron stand, or a delayed Chombo stand? In the end, he wasn't paying much more (8,000 points versus a 9,000 point Chombo mistake) and it was agreed that it would be unfair to the Oya to have it change over due to his mistake since it's possible to discard differently due to a Riichi, therefore we called the win null and forced Player 2 to pay a Chombo.